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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27143107">The Kingslayer's Ghost</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/angel_deux/pseuds/angel_deux'>angel_deux</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Game of Thrones (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Canon Compliant, F/M, ME? write a fic where Jaime starts out dead and stays that way?, Major character death - Freeform, anyway i hope you trust me to write a ghost fic that's just...nice, ghosts! spooky shit!, vaguely inspired by my bly manor feelings so do with that what you will</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 06:49:45</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,086</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27143107</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/angel_deux/pseuds/angel_deux</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Every night, when the room is dark, Jaime visits her.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>152</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>367</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Kingslayer's Ghost</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>So I decided i wanted to write a spooky fic today. This was not that spooky fic. This was a sad, cathartic fic that came to me while I was PLOTTING the actual fic. I think it's probably a bit sad, but mostly I wanted it to be romantic and nice. Sometimes when canon gives you shit, you have to resort to ghosts to make it nice again.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>She’s lying in bed, and he is behind her. He isn’t touching her, but she can feel his breath on her skin. It makes her think of Winterfell. She used to wake in the night and feel him there, nestled close, under the furs. The fire crackling in the corner. His feet tangled up with hers, his right arm around her. His breath warm on the back of her neck, or her breath warm on the back of his.</p>
<p>There are no furs on this bed. No fire crackling in her room. No light at all, save the moonlight that comes through the open curtains. The Lord Commander’s chambers are warm, the air in King’s Landing balmy enough that Brienne sleeps under only a thin sheet, if anything at all. Sometimes she wakes sweating, her sheet kicked off in the night, but only on the nights when he isn’t with her.</p>
<p>His breath is cold. His touch colder. He had been so warm, before.</p>
<p>“Jaime,” she whispers.</p>
<p>“I’m here,” he replies.</p>
<hr/>
<p>The first time, she thought she was dreaming. Or she thought she had carried some part of a dream into the waking world, but only until she found a light and banished the last of it.</p>
<p>She opened her eyes, and he was standing beside her bed, lit only by moonlight that turned him gray and blue and…</p>
<p>(Ghostly. She refused to even think the word. Ghostly.)</p>
<p>His mouth was moving, but nothing came out. Not sound. Not breath. He was silent.</p>
<p>(How many nights had he stood there? Beside her bed. Watching her. Trying to speak to her.)</p>
<p>He looked desperate, and wrong. There was dust in his hair, and in his beard, and there was blood on him. Soaking the front of his shirt. One of his ribs, she saw, was bone white, and poking through his shirt, and there was blood there, too. One side of his head was odd, with the moonlight highlighting a divot in his skull. Off-centered. Damaged, like the falling rocks had caved it in. She scrambled to her knees, turned her back, grabbed the lantern by her bed and lit it with fingers that shook. When she turned around again, he was gone. Banished by the light. She sat with her back pressed against the wall and stared at the spot in which he had stood. She pulled her knees to her chest, and she wept like a child until the sun was up.</p>
<p>In the morning, in the light, she felt like a fool, and she promised to forget it. It was a dream. It wasn’t real. She was tired, and she grieved for Jaime, and that was all.  </p>
<p>The second time, he was only a whisper, rousing her from sleep. <em>Brienne. Brienne. Please, Brienne. Brienne. </em>She opened her eyes to find no one. Nothing. She was relieved. It hurt. There was no sign of him. She sat in bed and clutched the sheet to her chest and saw no one. There was a shadow that flickered in the corner of her eye. It looked like a man’s pale hand, reaching, reaching out for her. Whenever she turned her head, it was gone. The lantern again did away with even that, and the hand did not return, and again she cried.</p>
<p>She began to sleep with the lantern lit. She began to build fires in the night, though it was too warm, and far too bright. She stole candles from every room in the castle and kept them burning. Light, always light. It didn’t matter how poorly she slept, and it didn’t matter how tired she was in the morning, because it meant that she did not have to see him, and she did not have to remember. It was the easiest way of living once he was dead and gone: forgetting him. Letting him lie. Throwing herself into duty, into work. It was the reason she accepted the position of Lord Commander. It was the reason she spent every moment working, trying to make King’s Landing a better place. There was no time to mourn what she had lost. There was no time to think about what she still had.</p>
<p>“He’s waiting for you,” Bran said, once. Brienne did not ask him who he meant. She pretended not to know what he meant.</p>
<p>She woke one night from a dream. The lantern was still lit, and there were no shadows or ghosts or whispers in her room. Candles burned on the window sill, and on the table across the room, and on every available surface. It was too hot, and her sheet was crumpled on the ground.</p>
<p>In the dream, Jaime had been Jaime. Not a sad, broken shade with dust in his hair and regrets etched across his face. He’d been full of laughter and amusement and grief. A complicated man, but a man she had loved. She had loved him so <em>much.</em> It would have been easier to love a simpler man, maybe. A man less torn. Less uncertain. A man with a less devoted heart. But he would not have been Jaime, then. In the dream, he had been himself, and she missed him when she woke.</p>
<p>The candles by her bed were burning down to nothing. She went through more candles than anyone, but no one ever asked about it. They all had their ghosts. She might have been the only one with a ghost so literal, but she was not the only one haunted.</p>
<p>She blew out the candles one by one. It was a foolish thing. She knew she would shake until dawn if she saw him. She would cry, and be forced to remember. She didn’t care. She felt a hunger. A need to see him. She was oddly afraid that she wouldn’t. Like days and weeks of banishing him with candlelight would have driven him away completely.</p>
<p>She made the room dark except for moonlight, and she curled up on her side in her bed, and she waited. She watched the room in front of her. She watched in the corners of her eyes. She watched for a change in the shadows. She felt the bed depress behind her.</p>
<p>“Jaime,” she whispered.</p>
<p>“I’m here,” he replied.</p>
<hr/>
<p>Sometimes he leaves dust on the sheets. Sometimes there are smears of his blood. She falls asleep with him beside her, and when she wakes, he’s gone, but he leaves evidence of himself behind. Reminders. She stares at it in the mornings. Rubs the dust between her fingertips. Confirms that it’s real. She isn’t mad. She isn’t seeing things. He isn’t some figment or some form of grief and guilt visiting her at night. He is real. He is Jaime. And he is with her. She tells herself this every morning, and she believes it every night. But by the afternoon, the dust is gone. The blood is gone. No matter what, she can’t keep these pieces of him. This proof. It leaves more slowly than <em>he</em> does, but still it leaves.</p>
<hr/>
<p>She stops lighting her candles at night. She stops lighting her fires. She banishes the light, because he only comes to her in the dark. Some nights he is barely there at all. Some nights he’s a voice. <em>Brienne. Brienne. Please, Brienne.</em> Some nights he is a hunched shadow in the corner, watching her, eyes gleaming with tears that never fall. Sometimes she can’t hear him speak. Sometimes he stands in front of her, reaching out for her, and if she is brave enough to get out of bed and move toward him, he tries to touch her before he goes, but her fingers go right through his, and then he disappears.</p>
<p>Those are the worst nights, because he is a memory. A broken memory of a man. Not a memory she has of him. It must be one he has of himself. Fading, failing, lost. Calling out for her and receiving no answer. <em>I’m here,</em> she’ll whisper aloud when she hears him.<em> Jaime, I’m right here. </em>But he doesn’t hear her. He isn’t him.</p>
<hr/>
<p>Other nights.</p>
<p>Other nights, she can feel his fingers press into her skin. She can feel his breath on the back of her neck. Points of cold, and maybe in Winterfell it would be difficult, to have a ghost so cold sharing her bed, but in King’s Landing, it’s different. She welcomes it. A shiver up her spine and an ache in her chest. Sometimes, he is solid enough to kiss her. She can feel his lips on the back of her neck.</p>
<p>“Jaime,” she says.</p>
<p>“I’m here,” he replies.</p>
<p>If she turns, some nights she cannot see him. He vanishes when she dares to look.  But it’s worth the risk, because on other nights, he’s still there. Lying in bed beside her. Sleepy and happy and content. <em>Himself. </em>The man from Winterfell. His cold feet tangle with hers, and she doesn’t mind. He nestles close. He looks at her and talks to her like he has forgotten what happened to him after he left her bed. Like he has forgotten what he is. She learns quickly not to say anything to remind him, because his hold on this world is so easy to shatter. The first time she sees him, and can touch his face, and feel his skin, she cries, and he is alarmed, and then he remembers, and then he’s gone, and she doesn’t see any sign of him for three days. It takes weeks for him to crawl back to the way he was. He is a shadow, and a voice, and a broken thing, and then he is whole again. Touching her. Kissing her. Content beside her, and she learns to cherish those nights when he is most himself. Most like the Jaime who left.</p>
<p>“I loved you,” he tells her, once. He almost seems to understand. “Did I ever tell you that?”</p>
<p>“Not in words,” she says, and he smiles, but it does not reach his eyes.</p>
<hr/>
<p>Years pass.</p>
<p>She ages. He does not. He never leaves. Sometimes she hears tales of him. Tyrion admits to having seen his dead big brother wandering the halls. The others think Tyrion is a poor, mad little brother who lost the one family member he loved, and they pretend to believe him to his face and cluck their tongues behind his back. Brienne does not want to know what they would say about <em>her </em>if they knew, so she does not tell them. Not even Tyrion. She lets him stand on his own, his conviction clear. She does not dare tell anyone, for fear that Jaime will leave her if she does.</p>
<p>Sometimes she thinks Tyrion knows anyway. He looks at her as if he does. As if he thinks that she’s keeping Jaime selfishly to herself. Maybe she is. Maybe. </p>
<p>Some of her other Kingsguard are frightened of the ghost of the Red Keep. The Kingslayer’s Ghost. They say he haunts the White Sword Tower. They say he appears in throne room. In the crypts. One young man has a particularly thrilling story about finding the White Book open to his page night after night, no matter where the book was placed in the afternoon. Brienne listens to his tale with a blank expression and tells the lad that he should switch duties with someone if he’s too frightened to walk the halls at night.</p>
<p>The king talks to him, sometimes. That’s worst of all. Brienne will be standing guard, and he will say, “no, she can’t see you now” and “you know why” and “yes, I think so too”, and Brienne will frown, and refuse to engage, and pretend that she doesn’t know what’s going on. But Bran is odd, everyone knows this, and so everyone else treats these conversations the same way they treat his occasional prophecies or his seeming ability to ferret out what everyone is thinking. Brienne knows. Tyrion must know, too. They just never talk about it.</p>
<hr/>
<p>Most nights.</p>
<p>Most nights, he’s there. Most nights, he’s whole. Not bloodied and lost and covered in the dust from the crypts. He is the Jaime from Winterfell, and he loves her. She isn’t frightened anymore. She doesn’t cry anymore. It’s nice, she thinks. Even if she <em>is </em>mad, maybe it’s a kindness, to give her this comfort through her nights. She grows older, and her joints ache, and she heals more slowly from minor injuries, and she thinks about the things he’d complained about when he was alive. His jokes, whenever he was tired and half-bitter about how much older he was than her.</p>
<p>“I’m older than you,” she whispers to him once. She can’t help it. Jaime smiles. Doesn’t disappear, like she fears he will. Some nights, he is strong enough to stay even when he remembers. The blood will appear. The dust. He’ll cling to her. Whisper broken apologies. Sob. Not tonight. Tonight, he seems to remember, but it’s like when he’s a shadow, and she can see him out of the corner of her eye. If he doesn’t look at it, if he doesn’t acknowledge it, he can stay for a little while longer. He seems to know this.</p>
<p>“You’ll always be the same age I remember,” he says.</p>
<p>“I miss you.”</p>
<p>“How can you? I’m still here.”</p>
<p>“I miss you anyway.”</p>
<p>He smiles.</p>
<p>(“What a life we could have had,” he says, once.)</p>
<hr/>
<p>He smiles a lot. He doesn’t laugh. She misses his laugh. Sometimes he feels like himself, until she remembers that she has forgotten what his laugh sounds like. He’s sad, this Jaime. Always, even when he smiles, there’s something empty in it. Something behind his eyes. Sometimes she thinks he’s unaware of what he is, but then she sees it. He’s never unaware. He tries to be. He quivers with it, sometimes. His outline indistinct. Like he’s straining to hold on. Sometimes she touches his face, and she can see the tension leave, see his coiled body relax, just a bit. She wants to tell him to let go. <em>You’re trying so hard</em>, she would say. <em>To stay with me. I don’t need you here. It’s okay. I’m okay. </em></p>
<p>She doesn’t.</p>
<p>Is it selfish? She doesn’t know. She doesn’t want to think that it is. She has known love to be selfish. Not Jaime’s, she doesn’t think. She thinks he might have thought so, at the end. Sometimes, when he is broken, not himself, he asks her questions. <em>How could you have loved me? How could you love me still? I was a monster. I should not be here. </em>But she tells him he’s not a monster. That he never was. She tells him she loves him. She never lies.</p>
<p>“I always understood,” she tells him once. “Why you left.”</p>
<p>“You cried,” he remembers. She imagines she can see the moonlight through him. Or maybe she <em>can</em>. Maybe he fades. She doesn’t know. She touches his face.<em> Stay with me</em>, she thinks. She holds him until he’s solid again, his skin firm against hers. He bows his head, and she presses her lips to his forehead. They are tangled together in her bed. She can feel him. He’s cold. <em>I am a mad woman</em>, she thinks, suddenly alert. <em>He isn’t real. I’m mad, and in love with a memory.</em> Still, just in case, she tells him.</p>
<p>“I cried because I loved you, and because I knew you would not survive. You left because you needed to try to save her, even if you knew it was a lost cause.”</p>
<p>“I could not have stayed without losing myself,” he says, and she nods. She kisses him again. She kisses him to keep him here. To remind him. To beg him. <em>Stay with me.</em></p>
<p>“You didn’t lose anything. You’re still yourself.”</p>
<p>“I’m here,” he says. “You’ve never asked why.”</p>
<p>But he is gone before she can, and it’s two weeks before he’s himself again. Two weeks of shadows in the corner and outstretched hands, and whispers of <em>Brienne</em> as she sleeps.</p>
<hr/>
<p>It is a cycle. A mad cycle. How does she live like this? She wonders. It all feels perfectly natural to her. She has lived more years with her ghost than she has lived without him.</p>
<hr/>
<p>She dies, as everyone dies.</p>
<p>It is daylight, in the throne room. The assassins make their attempt in the middle of court, and Brienne and the rest of the Kingsguard stop them, but the Lord Commander is not as quick on her feet as she used to be, and she dies. It’s fast, when it happens. It doesn’t hurt very much. A sword to the neck. She falls to the ground. Her killer flinches. Shudders. Like a cold has passed through him. One of Brienne’s soldiers kills him. Jaime kneels beside her.</p>
<p>He doesn’t speak to her as she dies, but he stays beside her, and he watches her. He looks different. More solid. Younger, like he was when she first knew him. Or maybe she has just grown so old.</p>
<p>“Jaime,” she says. Tyrion is kneeling beside his brother, screaming for a maester, trying to keep her blood in her body. When Brienne speaks, he follows her eyeline, and looks to his left, and for a moment Brienne swears that Tyrion can see him. Jaime. Jaime’s eyes are on her, and he looks anguished to watch her die, as if he has not been dead for years.</p>
<p>When she stands, Jaime helps her. His hand in hers. He’s warm. There is no dust in his hair. No blood on his face.</p>
<p>“Don’t look back,” he tells her, like a man who has experience. She doesn’t. She knows what she will see. Bran is smiling at them from the throne, among the chaos. That placid, friendly smile.</p>
<p>“Goodbye,” he tells them. Tyrion shouts at him. Calls him an absolute bastard, and keeps shouting, but Brienne can’t make out the words. Just soundless fury. She is fading.</p>
<p>“I waited for you,” Jaime says.</p>
<p>“You were real.”</p>
<p>“Yes.”</p>
<p>She knew it, but she is relieved to hear it anyway. She smiles at him.</p>
<p>“You stayed.”</p>
<p>“Yes.” More emphatic this time, and that pain behind his eyes is still there, but it’s less. He’s so warm. Almost burning.</p>
<p>“Because I asked you to,” she says.</p>
<p>“Yes,” he says. He’s crying. She might be, too.</p>
<p>“I didn’t mean forever,” she points out.</p>
<p>Jaime laughs.</p>
<p>“Yes you did,” he says.</p>
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